CNN reports government conspiracy!

Posted on March 14, 2012 by oddmanout215

Did you hear about this thing called the military-industrial complex, a deep-seated alliance between the U.S. government and American corporations that makes sure we are almost always involved in wars, declared or undeclared? Dwight Eisenhower identified it in 1961, and this week CNN caught on. From Raw Story:

CNN commentator Jack Cafferty railed against the United States’ ongoing involvement in Afghanistan following the alleged murder of 16 Afghan civilians by a rogue U.S. soldier.

“How much is enough?” he said Tuesday. “The United States has been in Afghanistan for more than ten years. And President Obama insists we will remain in Afghanistan until the end of 2014. Why? What will be accomplished by staying in that godforsaken hellhole for another 20 months that hasn’t been accomplished in 10 and a half years…?”

“Why don’t the American people have anything to say about what we’re doing?” Cafferty added. “We have no voice in any of this stuff any more. They go into Iraq, they go into Afghanistan, they might go into Iran. We got nothing. We’re just kept in the dark and the government does whatever the hell it feels like doing, or preferably what it is being told to do by the people who pay the politicians’ bills. Remember that warning from Dwight Eisenhower about the military-industrial complex? It’s got this country by the throat.”

Yes, I’m being a smart-ass. Cafferty’s commentary was on the money and necessary, if only because so many Americans are still asleep to the fact that the two wars on the other side of the world are killing our credibility, not to mention hundreds of thousands of people.

But still — why weren’t the talking heads stating the obvious years ago?

Posted in history, humor, Iraq war, mainstream media | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

New chapter in jolly-good scandal

Posted on March 14, 2012 by oddmanout215

From GUARDIAN UK

Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand gal is back in the news and back in jail. How much damage will her latest setback do to Britain’s PM, David Cameron? From Guardian UK:

Rebekah Brooks is among six people arrested by Scotland Yard detectives on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, as part of the investigation into phone hacking. The former News International chief executive was arrested at her home in Oxfordshire by detectives from Operation Weeting. Sources also said that her husband, racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, was arrested…

The former Sun and News of the World editor was held in the summer 48 hours after she resigned as News International’s chief executive.

Rebekah Brooks became editor of the News of the World in 2000, before moving to the same position at the Sun in 2003. A close confidante of Rupert Murdoch in her time at the titles, she was elevated to become chief executive at News International in 2009, until she was forced to resign in July of last year as hacking allegations mounted in the wake of the revelation that a phone belonging to missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler was targeted.

Both Rebekah and Charlie Brooks are close Oxfordshire neighbours of David Cameron. Their friendship with the prime minister came under fresh scrutiny recently after Cameron admitted he did ride a retired police horse lent to Rebekah Brooks by Scotland Yard in 2008…

The Cameron angle was stressed in today’s Daily Beast:

Some Murdoch watchers have even insinuated that Cameron’s friendship with Rebekah Brooks could be stronger than his friendship with her husband. Rebekah was a guest at Cameron’s 40th-birthday party in October 2006, even though her future husband was reportedly not on the list. And a Vanity Fair story last month claimed the two were so close that Cameron signed letters to her, “Love, David.”

Pull yourself together, man! Don’t you know those hot-tempered redheads — Daily Beast called Rebekah the “flame-haired Murdoch favorite” — are nothing but trouble? I thought you were a stalwart advocate of austerity… or did you merely mean austerity for the poor?

Footnote: Why did the Daily Beast article sound like something out of Vanity Fair? Oh, of course — Tina Brown.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Santorum, the ‘stealth lobbyist’

Posted on March 13, 2012 by oddmanout215

The headline alone was enough to make me laugh: “Santorum accuses Fox News of shilling for Romney.” This is like Madonna accusing a rival diva of lip-synching. It’s another example of why many of us use the words “Christian” and “hypocrite” interchangeably.

According to Raw Story, Santorum complained to Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade that “[Romney] has had a 10-to-1 money advantage. He has Fox News shilling for him every day. No offense, Brian, but I see it.”

Santorum should choose his words more carefully. “Shilling” might as easily describe what he did for a living after he lost his U.S. Senate seat. From ABC News:

Rick Santorum entered Congress with modest means. But not long after he left in 2006, the former two-term senator reaped the rewards of his time on Capitol Hill, earning more than $1 million last year in cash and stock for advising corporate clients, sharing his insights with social organizations, and consulting for media outlets.

“He has been, essentially, a stealth lobbyist,” said Bill Allison, editorial director for the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group. “He has been hired to try to influence policy on behalf of his clients without crossing the thresholds that would require him to report what he’s doing.”

The rural Pennsylvania politician who boasts his common man appeal has traveled a familiar path for those who have left public service, Allison said. After helping to shape policy on the Senate finance and banking committees, Santorum accepted paid consultant jobs for insurance and energy firms with key issues pending before the politician’s former colleagues.

The work has been lucrative — in 1996 he reported assets ranging from $155,000 to $475,000 on the personal financial disclosure form he filed with the Senate. The report he filed in August 2011 as he began his presidential bid show his assets are now valued between $1.9 million and $4 million, including rental properties and robust investment and college savings funds.

A shill gets paid to enthusiastically promote an entity, often without disclosing the extent of his ties to that entity. Is there a difference between a shill and an under-the-radar influence peddler such as Santorum? Maybe, but I’ll bet you’d have a hard time making the distinction to any reasonable person.

Posted in Congress, mainstream media, Mitt Romney, Politics | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Socialism is not a dirty word

Posted on March 12, 2012 by oddmanout215

I saw this video at Suburban Guerrilla and thought of all the people I know who probably didn’t see it…

In his travels, journalist and author David Cay Johnston talked to a dozen tour-bus drivers in beautiful downtown Stockholm and discovered that each of them owned two homes free and clear. After his WTF! moment passed, Johnston put together a few thoughts on why Sweden is such a civilized place to live:

It’s because [Swedes] organize their economy to provide what Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations an economy should do. [Smith thought] any policy that benefits the majority must be good policy.

We organize our economy on the theory that the very, very richest among us, the multibillionaires, don’t have enough, and that unless we give them more, our economy can’t grow. That’s just nonsense!

There’s a reason you don’t read or see stories like Johnston’s in the corporate media: The billionaires and their stooges long ago decided that what we don’t know can’t hurt them.

Footnote: This post corrects an earlier post in which I referred to David Cay Johnston as an economist.

Posted in livable cities, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Serfs don’t need no schoolin’

Posted on March 9, 2012 by oddmanout215

Uneducated = ignorant and apathetic, which is just fine with Romney and his cronies

Many politicians and business leaders these days think the public education system is overvalued. After all, you don’t need to read The Great Gatsby to operate a power mower. You don’t have to know the atomic weight of carbon to empty bedpans or flip burgers. So why the fuss over the fact that Congress might allow the fixed interest rate on Stafford government-subsidized loans for college students to double this summer?

We know why the yahoo wing of the Republican Party — Rick Santorum is in the vanguard — thinks college educations are for snobs. It’s because colleges are staffed by the sort of people who teach evolution and contraception, and make you read things like Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man.

But many of us don’t understand why savvy businessmen such as Mitt Romney are just as likely as the yahoos to take a stand against government-subsidized education of the working classes. Paul Krugman explained today:

… Over the past 30 years, there has been a stunning disconnect between huge income gains at the top and the struggles of ordinary workers. You can make the case that the self-interest of America’s elite is best served by making sure that this disconnect continues, which means keeping taxes on high incomes low at all costs, never mind the consequences in terms of poor infrastructure and an under-trained work force.

And if underfunding public education leaves many children of the less affluent shut out from upward mobility, well, did you really believe that stuff about creating equality of opportunity?

So whenever you hear Republicans say that they are the party of traditional values, bear in mind that they have actually made a radical break with America’s tradition of valuing education. And they have made this break because they believe that what you don’t know can’t hurt them.

Krugman might have added that Romney and his CEO cronies — cheered on by media agents for globalization, such as the New York Times’ Tom Friedman — care nothing about fixing America’s education system because they care nothing about Americans. Once the global economy became a reality, they no longer had a reason to invest in education. They could outsource jobs that require advanced education, or import highly skilled workers. Anything but pay taxes to help educate Americans to do those jobs!

Yes, it’s true that college education isn’t for everybody, and that the need for trades people of all sorts is as important as the need for college-educated workers. But the ruling class’s antipathy to public education is about more than this. It’s about belief in government for the few rather than the many, and about the arrogant assumption by bloodless drones like Romney that the majority of Americans are going to passively accept serfdom as their lot in life.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, Mitt Romney, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Gabriel to Limbaugh: Lay off my tunes

Posted on March 8, 2012 by oddmanout215

It looks like Rush Limbaugh might have to stoop to using Ted Nugent’s music as soundtracks for his rants. I can’t think of any other rocker who might be a good fit. From USA Today:

Peter Gabriel doesn’t want Rush Limbaugh’s radio show to use his music, in the wake of the Sandra Fluke controversy.

Gabriel’s song Sledgehammer played in the background while Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” after she testified at a congressional hearing about contraception, reports CBS News.

On his Facebook page, a note was posted from Gabriel’s reps saying the rocker was “appalled to learn that his music was linked to Rush Limbaugh’s extraordinary attack.”

The statement adds, “It is obvious from anyone that knows Peter’s work that he would never approve such a use. He has asked his representatives to make sure his music is withdrawn and especially from these unfair aggressive and ignorant comments. “

Posted in arts, humor, pop music | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Tax-dodging corporate liars

Posted on March 8, 2012 by oddmanout215

What a surprise. It seems those those CEOs from Business Roundtable who met behind closed doors with Barack Obama Tuesday and with “Blue Dog” Democrats on Capitol Hill yesterday were much more interested in pushing for lower corporate tax rates than in discussing job creation. The CEOs argued that Congress “tax reform” shouldn’t be delayed until after the November elections. One of them, quoted in Roll Call, repeated an oft-heard complaint about corporate tax rates in America:

Procter & Gamble’s president and CEO Bob McDonald, who chairs the Roundtable’s tax and fiscal policy committee, said that the country’s corporate tax rate will become the highest in the world when Japan lowers its rate three weeks from now. The Obama administration recently released its own proposal for lowering the corporate tax rate from about 35 percent to about 28 percent. The CEOs said they support lowering it to about 25 percent.

McDonald is a liar, and Roll Call should have said so — politely, of course — by citing, as Salon did in November, the results of a study conducted by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

The authors looked at the tax filings from 2008-2010 of 280 of the nation’s biggest, most successful corporations. These companies reported $1.4 trillion worth of profit during a period when most Americans were struggling to stay afloat. The authors discovered that the average effective tax rate — what the companies really paid after government subsidies, tax breaks and various tax dodges were taken into account — was only 18.5 percent, less than half the statutory rate. Fully a quarter of the 280 companies paid under 10 percent.

Remember that fact, the next time someone tries to tell you that American corporations pay the highest income taxes in the free world. The only number that counts is the “effective tax rate.” One of the interesting tidbits provided by the authors is that in many cases, the tax rate on foreign income for many of these companies is actually higher than the effective U.S. rate…

Think about it: Corporate tax rates in America are at a 40-year low, and still the CEOs bitch and lie about them. If only we had a president and Congress that would call them on their lies and greed.

Posted in Congress, Great Recession, mainstream media, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

‘Job creation’ behind closed doors

Posted on March 7, 2012 by oddmanout215

'Job creation' can mean all sorts of things, as Paul Muni demonstrates.

How comforting that Barack Obama was scheduled to have another closed-door meeting last night with CEOs from America’s largest companies. Did he talk to them about job creation? Did he go so far as to urge them to “start hiring,” as he allegedly did at previous meetings?

I guess we’re supposed to feel good about these meetings, even though they’re always held in private, and with no representatives of working people present. What sorts of jobs were discussed, and what pay rates? Was there talk about narrowing the wide gap between rich and poor?

As John Wayne and Buddy Holly would say, “That’ll be the day.”

For decades the one percent has complained that speaking out against income inequality is tantamount to engaging in class warfare. They’re right — we are in a class war, and the one percent is winning, arguably because both major political parties are on their side.

The significance of this war is all but ignored by the corporate media and, of course, by most politicians. Not only by the Republican establishment, which unequivocally believes in government by big business, but also by Democrats such as Obama, who aren’t even talking about saving or replacing the decent jobs that middle- and lower middle-class Americans once took for granted.

Ned Resnikoff on this sorry situation:

… When neoliberal pundits and policymakers talk about “job creation,” they’re rarely talking about a specific sort of job. Instead, they’re using the word job as a generic indicator to mean “a state of affairs in which some individual is somehow compensated to do something for whatever length of time under whatever conditions…” This is the danger of talking about “jobs” in the abstract: It can mean forcing people into precarious, temporary, low-wage, nonexistent-benefit work that will most likely land them back on the welfare rolls in a couple of months. Emphasis here belongs on the word forcing, because employers — faced with an oversupply of labor in the broader job market — have the upper hand in negotiations. These same employers can feel free to deprive their employees of the basic security needed to stay off welfare for good…

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Obama, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

NFL players paid to injure — shocking!

Posted on March 6, 2012 by oddmanout215

Like Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca, I’m shocked — shocked! — to hear National Football League players are being paid to injure players on opposing teams. From Steve Coll of the New Yorker:

On Friday, the National Football League disclosed some of the results of its self-directed investigation of “bounty” payments made to players on the New Orleans Saints. Some of the payments, the N.F.L. said, were handed out to Saints players as rewards for “inflicting injuries on opposing players that would result in them being removed from a game.”

I must be missing something. Aren’t all NFL players — all those who play defense, that is — rewarded for “inflicting injuries on opposing players” while trying to keep the opposing team from scoring points? All the better, from the defensive point of view, if the injuries knock opposing players out of the games. Some of the most lauded players in NFL history — Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants, for one — are those who excelled at injuring players.

Oh, I see… The fuss is about the fact that players were offered monetary incentives to injure particular players. As if the head hunters on defense don’t always try to direct their violence toward certain players — most obviously, the opposing team’s quarterback. As if there isn’t always a monetary incentive — it’s called a contract — for using violence effectively while playing defense.

Coll speculates about the particulars of the payoffs. Were they made in cash from a special pool kept by Gregg Williams, the former Saints defensive coordinator? Were they added to paychecks, with taxes deducted?

There is something foggy-headed about Coll’s response to this so-called scandal. He singles out Williams for bringing “ugliness” into the game, but later on mentions “that more than two dozen Saints players, the general manager, and the head coach knew what Williams was doing.” He states that pro football’s long-term survival from violence-related litigation might depend on it becoming “a fast, acrobatic, spread-out passing game with fewer full-speed hits and much more athleticism.” But then he admits that no one “has quite figured out how to make a passing-driven version of the game work without at least some controlled violence.”

In the end, Coll reveals that he’s been trying to make a moral argument: “In any event, any business that evolves a workplace culture where dozens of people from top to bottom collectively lose sight of the difference between fair competition and corruption deserves to fail.”

And what is the difference between “fair competition and corruption” in an organization that became extraordinarily wealthy by rewarding players for effective use of so-called controlled violence? Coll doesn’t say, so I’ll say it for him: There is no difference.

Posted in humor, mainstream media, sports, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

AIPAC puts foot down — on Obama

Posted on March 4, 2012 by oddmanout215

Benjamin Netanyahu is a lot like former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, who once bragged he would “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” The Israeli PM has not only publicly scolded Barack Obama, he has warned him. He is giving him orders. Or at least he thinks he is:

Israel is pressing Barack Obama for an explicit threat of military action against Iran if sanctions fail and Tehran’s nuclear programme advances beyond specified “red lines”…

… Netanyahu… is expected to raise the issue at a White House meeting on Monday after weeks of intense diplomacy in which Obama has dispatched senior officials – including his intelligence, national security and military chiefs – to Jerusalem to try and dampen down talk of an attack.

Diplomats say that Israel is angered by the Obama administration’s public disparaging of early military action against Iran, saying that it weakens the prospect of Tehran taking the warnings from Israel seriously.

The two sides are attempting to agree a joint public statement to paper over the divide but talks will not be made easier by a deepening distrust in which the Israelis question Obama’s commitment to confront Iran while the White House is frustrated by what it sees as political interference by Netanyahu to mobilise support for Israel’s position in the US Congress.

Is Netanyahu taking heat from U.S. legislators for publicly disrespecting Obama? Are you kidding? Congress is too busy bowing to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group, which just happens to be meeting in Washington this weekend.

Obama mildly admonished Netanyahu in a speech to AIPAC today: “Already, there is too much loose talk of war.” But he also said, “I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I’ve made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

How long before Iran is attacked? Take a look at Obama’s record and ask yourself how often he has withstood pressure to make major concessions on policy issues. Then ask yourself how likely he is to stand up — or even pretend to stand up – to AIPAC in an election year.

Posted in Congress, mainstream media, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments